She had caught him by the arm. All her recklessness had vanished. She was appealing to him as a child appeals to one for protection against a bogey man.
He had his arms about her.
“No one shall take you from me,” he said. “Who is it that you fear, my dearest?”
She stared at him for some moments, and then burst into a laugh.
“I forgot—I forgot,” she cried. “You never heard it. How was it possible for you to hear it?”
Then she put down a hand to his that clasped her waist, and held it away from her. Her eyes were looking out over the whispering breadth of the wheat-field. The wood pigeons were still rising at intervals and curving downward with a glint of sunlight on their feathers.
She rose from where she was sitting against the bank, and picked up her sunshade.
“I am afraid that it is all wrong,” she said, shaking her head. “I have been too sudden—I had no right to listen to you—to tell you—but you came upon me before I was aware of it, and—oh, I told you just how I felt. As I kept telling you, I felt that I was telling myself the truth for the first time. But—well, I was free—that is to say, I should have been free if he had not said that he trusted in me. That was his trick... Oh, why did you come here to-day? Why—why—why? Could you not have waited until I had carried out my resolution to go to him and tell him that I would not be bound by any trick of his? You had no right to come as you did. I feel that I have been wrong—horribly wrong. I should have gone to him first.”
“Yes; but I came—I came, and you cannot take back a word that you spoke—that’s one good thing anyway,” said he in the voice of a man that no woman’s treble can oppose, unless it becomes shrill, and there is a craning of the neck as it is uttered.
“You will say that women have no sense of honour—I have heard men say that,” she continued, and there was indignation in her voice. “No sense of honour! Perhaps we have not; but I meant—yes, it was my sense of honour that made me make up my mind to go to him and give him to understand that I meant to be free—free, not merely in name, but really free—free so that he should have no right to say that he trusted me. He said that he trusted me—those were his words; they sounded generous at the moment, but then I perceived that—that——” Her utterance became more deliberate; then it seemed to occur to her that there was something wanting on the part of her auditor: there was a puzzled expression on his face that puzzled her at first interfering with her fluency; then all at once she seemed to recollect that the extent of her knowledge of the subject on which she was speaking was a good deal more than his could possibly be. How could he be expected to know what had been kept a secret from her father and mother—from all the world?